Jewel Cay, Honduras (just off the coast of Utila) has truly become home for us over the past three months.  We have our own apartment, friends, neighbours, and landlords that have become our adopted family.

Our Apartment

In two short weeks, we will be saying goodbye to it all, dusting off our backpacks, and continuing our journey with a trip to Nicaragua to meet up with my mom.  I’ll be sad to go, but I can’t begin to describe how excited I am to see my momafter nearly 7 months away from our family.

Sunset on Jewel Cay

At first, for Mike and I, the most exciting part of renting our one bedroom apartment on Jewel Cay was finally having an oven (see the pictures below to see just how excited Mike was… if it wasn’t so hot, he probably would have been hugging it!).  After months of hostel kitchens with one pot, one pan, and no oven, we were thrilled to be able to bake things again… so thrilled that we consumed something like 5 pounds of flour, 3 sticks of butter, and who knows how much sugar in the first week alone!

Mike Baking Biscuits

Mike Baking Oatcakes

Mike Baking Bread

We have made bread, biscuits, cinnamon buns, ham and cheese buns, perogies, shepherd’s pie, borscht, and many of the other goodies we miss from home.  In a moment of homesick weakness, we even enjoyed a classy meal of KD (Kraft Dinner {mac and cheese}) and hotdogs.

Ham, Onion & Cheese Buns

The real beauty in having an apartment, though, is that settling in immediately gave us a feeling of home… a private space where we could unpack our things and hang out whenever we feel like it.

Home

We even have a cat that hangs around the hotel where we go to use the internet.  His name is Balls, Scuba, or Slobber… depending who you ask.  He makes us miss our cat, Pi, a little bit less… or is it a little bit more?

Slobber... we call him that for obvious reasons

Renting an apartment has really made a positive impact on our budget, too.  We pay $200 USD a month, which includes power (something that’s really expensive here) and water.  Our only other expenses are gas and food.  Propane for the stove costs about $15 for a tank, which probably lasts a few months (we wouldn’t know since our first tank was stolen and our second slowly leaked out its contents in about two weeks) and we spend an average of about $10 a day on food.  We can buy just about anything we want in any quantity we want… spices, mustard, mayonnaise and vanilla are sold by the spoonful, bread is sold by the slice, cabbage comes in heads, half heads, and quarter heads, and so on.

Really happy to be able to buy just the right amount of vanilla for egg nog and fried bananas. The cost... about 10 cents!

All in all, we’re spending a total of about $500-600 CAD per month.  Even though we’re still diving nearly everyday, it no longer costs us anything, so it’s a really affordable lifestyle.

Our only question now is… do we return to Utila after Nicaragua?  or move on with our travels?

When you are not diving, it’s nice to get out and stretch the legs some times. I really appreciate a good walk. Especially after living on our little Cays for the past two months. It turns out that diving is a lot different from walking, and my legs have more or less forgotten what walking is all about.

The problem is that Jewel and Pigeon Cays, where we live, have but a single sidewalk between them. The length of this sidewalk is somewhat inadequate, spanning around 400 meters, and I feel like the locals will start to think me crazy if I start speed walking laps every day.

Jewel Cay and Pigeon Cay

But the island of Utila, which we have come to call the mainland, has a lot more to offer by way of walking. There’s enough roadways to walk around for a few hours without doubling back on yourselves as long as you avoid the traffic. You can go to the fresh water caves at Pumpkin Hill, and you could check out the “drug plane”.

There is a crash site about an hour’s walk from town on the North side of the island, not far off the main road and the beach. Local legend has it that the plane crash landed in the middle of the night several years ago. When the police arrived on the scene, they discovered 1 ton of cocaine hidden in the walls of the aircraft. At least that’s the explanation given for why the whole aircraft has been completely gutted. How much truth there is to the story, I couldn’t say.

Finding the plane can be a bit of a trick. We had a guide, who had been shown the site before. If you ask around, you should be able to find someone who knows roughly where it is. Once you turn off the beach and head back inland you find yourself in the most gruelling part of the hike bushwhacking through trees and vines, and balancing on sharp, uneven ground made from ancient uprooted coral mounds. It’s not exactly hard, but it’s not a walk in the park either. Wear a good pair of shoes.

Walking on Coral

The Cockpit

The Fuselage

Emergency Exit

Climbing on the Wreck

A Bit Broken Up

Posing for the Photo

6 months. 9875 kilometres. 4 countries. Impressive Amazing Race statistics they’re not, but then again we’re not exactly “racing” around the world. We’re taking it nice and slow.

Six months ago today, Mike and I stepped foot on a plane to Cancun, Mexico without much of a plan and with little idea of what we were getting ourselves into. Today, we are different people. Here’s some of the changes we’ve made:

Physical Changes

Whether we like it or not, the first opinion we form of people we meet is typically based on appearance. And in six short months, I would say we’ve both altered our appearances fairly dramatically. Luckily, we have our pictures from our International Driving Permits that were taken two weeks before we left for comparison sake.

Check out the two couples… which pair would you say are happier, more energetic, and more interesting?

We’ve both lost a significant amount of weight from our healthier lifestyle (exactly how much is hard to say… weight scales are hard to come by here), our tans are darker than they’ve ever been, we rarely ever sunburn anymore, our hair is bleached from the sun (check out how blonde I am now!), and we’re stronger than we’ve been in a long time.

All is not perfect, however. With our divemaster program, we typically go diving 2-4 times per day. We start “work” at 7:00 a.m. hauling tanks and helping students collect and set up their gear. We help set up the boat, check people into and out of the hotel, and spend at least a few hours each day dealing with hotel business, and working on planning and scheduling for the next day. Often, we won’t really have time to ourselves until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. We have recently started assisting on courses, which adds an extra level of responsibility for the safety of the students around you. It basically equates to having a full-time job (we haven’t forgotten what an awesome job it is though), working 5-7 days a week. And because we’ve got an apartment, there’s housework to keep up with too.

I would be lying if I said that I’m footloose and stress free with all these obligations. Just before Christmas, I found myself with a 72+ hour migraine. Then I woke with an ass-kicking, back-flattening flu on the morning of New Year’s Eve that confined me to nearly a week in bed and is still keeping me out of the water (Mike woke up with the same sore throat that morning, and was fine by day’s end). I know that this is my body’s way of telling me I’m trying to do too much. Just like at home, as responsibilities get piled on and the perfectionist/over-analyst inside of me works overdrive to do everything to 150% of my ability, I lose the ability to keep my life balanced. I become consumed in the stresses of things that are beyond my control and my body starts sending out S.O.S. messages in the forms of headaches and unchallenged bugs that my immune system should be able to beat into submission without much trouble.

So I know I need to keep working at finding balance in my life.  This is a critical lesson for me, because at some point we may find ourselves with 9-5 jobs again and I need to learn how to keep myself from getting burned out.

Emotional Changes – How We Feel About This Journey

When we travelled to the Yukon the summer before last, we stopped and did a few day hikes in the mountains on the way. When we returned home, we were reviewing our photos and found some landscape shots, taken from the summit of a mountain, that surpassed in beauty what we remembered seeing. We put one of these photos on our Traveled Earth business cards to remind ourselves not to take any moments in life for granted. We have truly experienced each and every moment on this journey (the good and the bad)… not just with a snapshot to remember it by, but a true appreciation for everything we are seeing and doing.

It was only about a month or so ago that we realized this journey no longer feels like a mere vacation. It’s now our lifestyle.  I think getting an apartment on Jewel Cay (one of the Utila Cays in Honduras) for a couple months has really helped us reach this point.  Having a place where we could unpack for a while and put the backpacks away helped fight some of the homesickness we were starting to feel.  We still miss the people at home (a lot!), but we now see just how easy it is to start up a life somewhere new.  We have friends, neighbours, and people that feel like family in close proximity to us.

Intellectual Changes

As I reflect over the last 6 months of my life, I am blown away by how much reflection I have done.  Taking away the stresses of a job and a house has given me the time and the freedom to explore other intellectual avenues.  Instead of thinking about my lesson plans for the next day, I spend a lot of time thinking about topics that have always interested me, but have never been enough of a priority to spend adequate mental time and energy on.  I have had some great discussions and reflections on world politics and economies, religion, spirituality, morality, ethics, cultural norms and beliefs, and physics (string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity), to name a few.

Changes To Our Budget

Our original budget goal was $100/day for the pair of us, including international transportation, accommodation, food, and all other expenses.

As of today, we have spent $10 642.48 CAD, which works out to an average of $57.84 per day, including the big ticket costs of 6 weeks of Spanish courses ($990 CAD), and all our diving courses in Utila (total cost = $2970 CAD) 1 open water course for me, 2 advanced open water courses, 2 rescue diver courses, 2 divemaster courses, 2 deep diver specialties, 2 wreck specialties, and 2 nitrox specialties). If you exclude these “big ticket costs,” but still include all the other excursions like swimming with whale sharks, snorkeling, ziplining, etc., our spending to date totals $6682.48, or $36.32 per day.

We now believe that a $100/day average for the entire journey is far too high. Because we don’t know how long we plan to spend in each country, it is nearly impossible to calculate a reasonable trip budget average, but we will try to use $100/day as a cap for the most expensive countries.

Changes To Our Packing List

Let’s be honest… this is a post in itself.  So look for it soon.  I will say, however, that I am currently typing this on our brand new, Boxing Day special, netbook.  After six months of sharing a single laptop, we realized we really wanted another one.  While we could keep getting by with one, we just didn’t want to any more.

Changes To Our “Rough Itinerary”

Six months into our trip, and we are already five months behind our “rough itinerary.”  Honduras, our home for the last two and a half months, wasn’t even included on it. Not too shabby, eh? We knew before we left that we weren’t going to stick to a schedule and we were true to our word.

Our immediate plan is to finish our divemaster course here in Utila by the end of January, head to Nicaragua at the start of February to meet up with my mom (can’t wait to see her!!!), and then maybe follow her into Costa Rica or head back up to see the parts of Honduaras and El Salvador that we missed out on.  In general, we are heading south… we keep saying we would like to catch a boat from Panama to Colombia when we finally get there, but we know better than to lay out a specific plan for ourselves.

We are definitely still planning to check out more of the world than Central and South America… but when?  Your guess is as good as ours.

Dear readers, friends, family. Ashley and I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas. I know it’s been a long time since we’ve seen many of you. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6 months, counting back to when we first started on this journey. Some of you we’ll see in the new year, and we are really looking forward to that, but for the most part, we’ll probably spend 2012 apart. I know it’s hard to stay in touch over such long distances and time, but we’re committed to keeping you up to date on what’s happening in our lives through our blog, facebook, twitter and email. We love hearing about what you’re up to as well, and have cherished every email, and blog comment that you’ve sent our way. In short, we just wanted to say… we miss you.

Here’s a little update on what Christmas has been like for us on the Cays (pronounced Keys)

It’s warm. It was 25 °C yesterday, and will probably hit 27-30 °C today. As you expect, there’s no snow, but we did have a healthy Christmas Eve rain shower yesterday which passed our test for a “white Christmas”.

Despite the lack of snow, there’s no lack of snowmen or decorations. Here’s photos of just a few. What’s really amazing is the amount of lights on display. Electricity here is really really expensive. But people cope by only turning their lights on for a few hours after sunset each day. A simple energy conserving trick you could try at home… maybe next year.

Christmas Decorations

Snowman Without Snow

We spent Christmas Eve with a couple of good Austrian friends, sharing a fabulous Christmas dinner in line with the Austrian tradition of celebrating on the 24th of December.  We had the best roast chicken, stuffing and homemade perogies in half a year, listened to the Hawksley Workman Christmas Album “Almost a Full Moon”, drank some rum and eggnog, and generally had a great time. By the end of the night, it really did feel like Christmas.

Ashley making perogies. The Nalgene water bottle doubled as a rolling pin!

Christmas Dinner

We were also invited for a pot-latch supper in Utila with the Captain Morgan’s staff. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be in both places at once… and a combination of boat captains taking the day off, weather, and a headache on Ashley’s part forced us to send our regrets. Merry Christmas guys, we’ll try and make it out for the next social.

That brings us to the 25th – our traditional day of Christmas back home

We opened our Christmas presents this morning, a new dive computer shared between us (an essential piece of diving equipment for any serious diver), and a potato masher. We actually used the potato masher last night to make the perogies, and it worked so much better than mashing with a fork!

If all goes well, we’ll get to try out our new dive computer this morning. Later for supper our landlords, some of the nicest people on the planet (we started the day with Christmas hugs from them), invited us over to their house for Christmas supper. We’re really looking forward to it.

That’s our Christmas!  When you get a chance, maybe drop us a line (through a comment or an email) and let us know how things went for you this holiday season.

All too often, preparing for Christmas is synonymous with accumulating stuff... buying presents, wrapping presents, putting up decorations, buying special foods and treats, and so on and so forth.

Now don’t get me wrong… I love Christmas and a lot of the “stuff” that comes with it.  Every time I see a decorated Christmas tree or colourful Christmas lights I get a warm, fuzzy feeling as I remember past Christmases – which were, I believe, some of the happiest moments of my childhood.  I don’t remember many of the presents I received, but I do remember hanging out with my family, eating good food, and simply just being happy.

The older I get, however, the less I seem to enjoy the gift-giving portion of Christmas.  This is largely because I’ve come to the realization that I don’t need more stuff.  In fact, I really don’t even want more stuff.  Stuff doesn’t make you happy.  It actually makes you feel more confined and tied down.  Getting rid of all the stuff I’d accumulated before this journey was one of the most freeing experiences I’ve ever had… and I will never be the same again.

The act of gift giving at Christmas is well ingrained in our culture and is riddled with stresses each step of the way.  First, you have to decide who you need to buy presents for.  This typically requires the careful evaluation of a list of everyone you know – friends, family members, and coworkers.  You don’t want the embarrassment of leaving someone out, especially if they’re planning to give you a gift.  Then, you need to decide how much to spend on each person.  Again, this is a stressful decision because you don’t want to come off as “cheap,” yet you don’t want to spend money you don’t have.  Once a budget is set, you need to figure out what each person would want, but doesn’t already own.  This can be difficult, even with people you have close relationships with.  Finally, you need to deal with all the other stressed out Christmas shoppers in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Personally, I like the idea of doing away with Christmas presents.  For the past few years, I have made arrangements with family members to forego the presents.  Instead of spending scads of money on stuff that people probably don’t really need (because if they did, they would have already purchased it themselves) and instead of receiving piles of stuff that I didn’t really want and would have to find somewhere to store, we have started using the money we would normally spend on “stuff” and donating it to a good cause.  We still get together, share some great food and drinks, and have some great conversations.  We just don’t open presents.  Because, to me,  Christmas is not about the presents… it’s about the people in your life.

This year, my mom used the money she would have spent on my present to buy hot chocolate, marshmallows, and cookies for all of the students at a local community school that don’t really get much for treats this time of year.  Knowing that those kids will have a special treat makes me so much happier than anything she could mail me here.  Last year we got together and  donated money to the charity of my homeroom students’ choice… buying a cow for a family in Africa.

So this holiday season, I encourage you to do the same (or next holiday season, as you have probably finished your Christmas shopping already).   Not buy a cow, I mean, but choose a cause that is meaningful to you or your parents/brother/sister/friend/spouse/boss/teacher/coworker (just make sure you’ve discussed the plan with the intended recipient so everyone’s on board… some people will prefer the “stuff” and that’s just fine too).  You were going to spend the money anyways, so why not spend it making a difference?

As we told you in our last post, we came to Utila, Honduras to get my Open Water certification in scuba diving.  That, and a few fun dives for the both of us.  That was supposed to be it.

The second I descended in open water that all changed… I was instantly drawn in by the new world that exists under the surface of the ocean.  Each dive found me more and more comfortable moving and breathing underwater and I discovered more and more cool things to see.

Before Mike had even dipped his toe in the water (okay, he had actually done some snorkelling at this point), I had him almost convinced that we should stay and do our Advanced Open Water certifications so we could dive deeper, try a night dive, and check out a wreck.

He whole-heartedly agreed with this plan after only his first fun dive… it seems we were both equally enamoured with the underwater world and weren’t ready to leave it behind as we travelled inland.  We pushed our cheapskate tendencies aside and forked out another $250 a person for our Advanced course.

We had such a great time with Captain Morgan’s Dive Centre and our instructor Talon (from 1dad1kid.com) that we decided to stick with them for the second course.  The course fee included 5 course dives, 2 free fun dives, and 3 nights accommodation.  Of the five course dives (termed adventure dives) we were required to do a deep dive (to 30 m) and a navigation dive.  After that we had our choice of the next three from about a dozen options.  We chose to do a wreck dive, a night dive, and a peak performance buoyancy dive.

The deep dive blew our mind as we looked at the colour and pressure changes to a Coke bottle at 30 m (100 ft).

The wreck dive was spectacular… the wreck is found between 18 and 30 m.  Even with exceptionally clear water, you can’t quite see it from the surface.  It’s just too deep.  As you descend, it slowly starts to materialize beneath you… really cool.

The night dive allowed us to experience yet another new world underwater, as everything we were used to seeing changed.  You get to see totally different critters out and about from what you see during the day, and the water has something called bio-luminescence which lights up and glows like hundreds of green stars as you swim through it.

Getting ready for our night dive

The navigation and peak performance buoyancy dives allowed us to improve our diving skills…

… which was important to us because we were toying with the crazy idea of sticking around Utila to take our rescue diver and divemaster courses.

Ultimately, after a week of heavy decision making, we decided to become divemasters (more on this later).

Which is why, almost seven weeks later, we are still in Utila.  And still loving diving and loving life.

Underwater Kiss - taken by Talon @ http://1dad1kid.com

Some of our favourite underwater sightings have included:  Hawksbill turtles (my favourite!), common octopus, eagle rays, southern stingrays, roughtail stingrays, yellow stingray, longsnout seahorses, moon jellyfish, free swimming green moray eels, scrawled filefish, lionfish, leopard flatworm, reef squid, juvenile spotted drums, parrotfish (Mike’s favourite!), and yellowtail damselfish.

Utila is a small island off the north coast of Honduras. It’s a fairly famous backpacker haunt because it’s the world’s cheapest place to learn how to scuba dive. An average certification course costs somewhere in the neighbourhood of $240-$270USD. When we left home, I had never heard of the place. Once we were on the road, It didn’t take long to meet people who had either already been to Utila, or were planning to go there.

If you recall, we had made plans to scoot through Honduras and spend some quality time volunteering in Nicaragua just as we were leaving Belize. After a lengthy bit of decision making, we decided we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get Ashley her open water scuba diving certification. I already had my certification from 11 years ago when I took the course along with most of my grade 12 class, and hadn’t been diving since. I’d never been diving anywhere near an ocean, and really wanted to give it a go.

We also figured that even if we couldn’t afford to do a lot of diving on this trip, we’d make good use of our certifications sometime down the road. It is a lifetime certification after all. So we planned a week long detour in Utila.

It was about the time we arrived that Hurricane Rina decided to pass by north of us. The weather wasn’t really that bad, as the hurricane did keep its distance, though the wind and waves were enough to keep the dive boats at bay for a few days. That gave us plenty of time to shop around for a good dive shop (of which there are a lot) and work out a low season discount. If you like the sound of the word discount, and are planning your own trip, plan on arriving during October or early November.

Then comes the tweet-up. That’s like a meet up, but with introductions and planning made through Twitter. We were fortunate to tweet-up with Talon and his son Steven from 1dad1kid.com. It was our first ever tweet-up and as luck would have it Talon is not only a super great guy, but he’s also an awesome scuba instructor. He was freelancing with a few shops, which luckily included the very same shop Ashley had picked out to do her course through… Captain Morgan’s Dive Centre.

By the time the winds had died down, Talon was secured as Ashley’s instructor, and she had already completed the theory portion of the class. Yes, becoming certified as a diver requires reading a manual, writing knowledge reviews, and a test on top of some skills in the water. It takes a bit of work, but it’s not so difficult that you need to worry about your ability to pass.

Talon and Ashley

I, on the other hand, spent most of my time in the hotel (included with the course!) reading books, watching movies, and trying to teach myself how to become a web programmer. For a few days at least. Each certification course comes with a couple of free “fun dives” so I had purchased a couple for myself so Ashley and I could dive together when she was officially certified. After two days of listening to all the amazing stories of spotted eagle rays, lobsters, trunk fish, and other cool marine animals I just couldn’t wait any longer. Not even the single day Ashley needed to finish her course. I decided to use my “fun dives” and then… I became hooked.

The truth is “I’m leaving tomorrow” constitutes the biggest lie told on this island. So far, our 1 week stay has been extended out over 6 weeks, and we’re certainly not leaving tomorrow.

At home in Honduras